


No One Else in Mind

by Schwoozie



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Class Issues, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Meet the Family, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 17:03:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19155298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: When the Starks get a little too insistent about Arya joining the ranks of coupled bliss, recruiting her best friend Gendry - who her family doesn't know exists - as an obnoxious date for them to despise seems like a perfectly reasonable response. All's fair in war, after all.And, you know. In that other thing too.





	No One Else in Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Arya is about 17 and a half in this; I decided to set this in the UK and needed to keep her below the drinking age for humor reasons. Gendry is 23-ish. I'll put a warning when things start to get sexy.
> 
> I wrote this first chapter in an unexpected burst of inspiration. I really hope it continues.
> 
> Title borrowed from "2 Atoms in a Molecule" by Noah and the Whale.

“My family is shit. Have I said that before?”

“Yeah, so you don’t have to say it again, I’m working.”

“You’re hiding from Yoren and playing Candy Crush on your phone, in what universe is that working?”

“Probably yours, rich girl.”

“Hah hah.”

Arya collapses next to Gendry on the floor of the garage where he works, unbothered by the dust and motor oil ass-stain she will definitely have on her jeans when she stands up. Gendry scoots over a few inches to give her room, not looking up from his phone.

Arya stares at the side of his face for a moment, then huffs a frustrated breath and looks down towards their legs. Arya’s are stretched out straight in front of her, and her feet are about the same distance away as Gendry’s are with his knees bent.

“They couldn’t even give me the right genes,” Arya says. “Everyone I’m related to is ten feet tall. Except for Jon, but we’re only half-related. Maybe his mum was short.” Arya lets her head thunk back against the wall. “Maybe Jon has been my full brother this whole time and I have tons of four-foot cousins watching from afar, complaining that I’m the tall one in the family.”

“The fuck you going on about?” Gendry’s finally put his phone down. Arya can tell because his voice doesn’t sound like it’s taking an extra few seconds for his mouth to remember how to form words. “Your family’s been teasing you ‘bout your height since you were two. That’s why you’re pissed at them?”

“ _No_ ,” Arya says, shooting him her ‘you’re too dumb to live’ look. He looks right back at her, eyebrows high on his forehead, clearly not willing to talk until she does. Stubborn idiot. Arya huffs again, crossing her arms and drumming a scuffed heel against the floor. “Sansa just had her six-month anniversary,” she mutters.

Gendry’s brows drop into a furrow. “She got married and you didn’t tell me?”

“ _Dating_ anniversary.”

“She keeps track of those?”

“Apparently. She dropped so many hints that Mum got her a cake. Then when Will came for Sunday dinner Mum made them take posed pictures like they really _were_ fucking married.” 

“Christ,” Gendry mutters. “That’s a bit… something.”

“Ya think?” Arya reaches into Gendry’s pocket and pulls out his keys, just for something to fiddle with. “Whoever invented the idea of Sunday dinners should have their fingernails ripped out and jammed in their eyeballs.”

“Okay, psycho.” Gendry steals his keys back. Arya makes a grab for them and he smacks her away. “That’s not eye for an eye. That’s like, eye for a roast chicken.”

“Easy for you to say,” Arya says, collapsing against him. His bare arm on hers is tacky with sweat, but she doesn’t mind. “You don’t have to drag your ass to that table every fucking week. And it’s a huge-ass table. It has to be because my parents obviously didn’t consider what would happen when their children got to breeding age when they threw out the condoms and had fucking five of us. Plus Jon.”

“How does putting the words ‘condoms’ and ‘my parents’ in the same sentence not give you the willies?”

“I’m an evolved being,” Arya says, closing her eyes. “Plus, I’m pissed. You know I don’t have a filter when I’m pissed.”

“You must be pissed all the time then.”

“Yup,” Arya says, popping the ‘p’. She sits up, bracing her hands on the filthy floor. “Speaking of-“

“I’m at _work_ , Arya, I’m not buggering off to buy you booze. Thought we agreed I’m not doing that again.”

“ _You_ agreed,” Arya says. “I simply didn’t argue back cause I knew I could harass you into it later.”

“You’re bloody good at harassing me.”

“Thank you.”

Gendry shoves her lightly with his shoulder. She shoves him back, and he retaliates with more force, nearly knocking her sideways.

“Knob,” she says.

“Wanker,” Gendry says.

Arya sticks her tongue out at him and he laughs. She tries to keep an annoyed face, but she can’t help her lips twitching. She’s never met anyone who laughs like Gendry does, a full-bodied exultation that starts in his belly and bursts from his mouth like a marching band, always a little too loud. When she first met him, she thought it was obnoxious, like drunk assholes who spend their mid-life crises pretending their dicks still work.

But she learned quickly that Gendry doesn’t pretend anything. He’s physically incapable of pretending to be or to feel something he isn’t. It’s why she’s jumped through so many hoops to make sure her family never finds out about their friendship. She loves her family (a fact she’ll only admit when she’s dead drunk), but they’re so obsessed with appearances it makes her want to scream. And she does scream, regularly, which is maybe the reason why everyone likes Sansa so much more.

Sansa gets angry. She’s _terrifying_ when she’s angry. But it’s a ‘I’ll poison you with a substance undetectable by human science and sneak your body out of the morgue so I can watch your flesh get squeezed through a meat grinder’ kind of anger. Which, while horrific to be on the wrong end of, doesn’t make the neighbors ask side-long questions about the ‘commotion’ they heard last night, and goodness, how could a respectable family like the Starks raise such a banshee?

And just like that, Arya’s brief good mood vanishes. A scowl returns to her face as Gendry’s laugh peters out.

“Hey,” he says, rocking into her when she doesn’t acknowledge him. “What’s the matter then? You know you’ll tell me eventually.”

“Fucking sure of yourself, huh.”

“Arya.”

Arya rolls her eyes to the ceiling, squeezing them shut to help squeeze the words out.

“It’s like everyone took this anniversary to mean that all that Joffrey shit is in the past. Which, thank fucking god and good riddance to the bottom of the ocean, but now that we aren’t walking on eggshells about relationships they’ve decided it’s time to care about _mine_. Incessantly.”

“What? You, what relationship?”

Gendry’s tone is tense enough that Arya opens her eyes and looks at him. He’s leaning a little away from her, and while she’s used to the confused crinkles in his forehead, there’s something about his pinched mouth and flickering eyes that she doesn’t fully recognize.

Arya frowns. “That’s the point. I don’t have one.” A strange look flickers across Gendry’s face, almost like embarrassment, and he relaxes back towards her. _Weirdo_ , Arya thinks uneasily, pushing Gendry’s odd behavior to the back of her mind. “I’m the _only_ one who doesn’t have one. And suddenly it’s like not having a boyfriend means I’m doing dishonor to the family cow. The past few Sundays Mum’s set an extra plate and chair next to mine. Like she expects a random asshole will pop in off the street and see the empty chair and say, ‘Wow, this seat is open. Gee whiz, I should take Arya Stark to the sock hop and maybe she’ll even wear my purity ring.’”

Gendry makes a strangled sort of noise, which she takes as conveying both amusement and horror. Arya plants her feet on the floor and bends her knees, mirroring Gendry’s posture. “It’s ridiculous and it shouldn’t bother me but it’s getting old. Like, they don’t _get_ it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“I don’t want to date anyone!” Arya exclaims, throwing a look towards the manager’s office when she realizes how loud she was. She continues, voice lowered. “Like, being ready 24/7 to respond to some asshole’s whiny texts cause if I don’t get back in five seconds he’ll think I’m in the back seat of a car with some fitter guy’s hand up my cooch? Or having to _go_ places? Or spending two hours before every time I see him finding an outfit that says ‘down to clown, but not in a ho kind of way, but I’m not a prude either, but I am _so_ into you that golly geeze, I spent two hours dressing up like a fucking Barbie doll so you aren’t embarrassed to be seen with me in public’? No. No thank you, nope.”

Arya finishes her rant a little out of breath. She tosses her hair over her shoulder and pouts. Gendry’s face is doing weird things, like he’s trying to swallow a live grasshopper without letting anyone know it’s still squirming in his throat.

“I… there’s more to dating than that.”

Arya levels him with a glare. “Whose side are you on?”

“Yours,” he says quickly, like he expects her to stab him if she senses a whiff of hesitation. Which isn’t that irrational a fear on his part. “But… all that just sounds like a _bad_ relationship. It wouldn’t be like that with the right person. A real partner, you know?”

“A _partner_?” Arya says incredulously. “Are you a closet marriage counselor or something?”

“I’m just _saying_ , you tend to go to the worst-case scenario when you’re freaked about something.”

“I’m not _freaked_ , freak.” Arya blows out a breath, grinding the heels of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars. “I’m just tired of my family only liking me when I pretend I’m the person they want me to be.”

“Hey.” Gendry wraps his fingers around her wrists and tugs her hands from her eyes. She sniffs and blinks her eyes rapidly cause she wasn’t crying and him looking at her like he wants to fix everything won’t make her start, the jerk. “That isn’t true and you know it. You bitch about them all the time and yeah some of it is a dysfunctional nightmare but fuck, sounds to me like they just don’t like seeing you lonely.”

Arya scowls, yanking her arms from his grasp. “I am _not_ lonely. I have you, don’t I?”

Gendry’s face does that strange thing again. Arya curses herself silently.

“I mean, I’m happy how I am.”

“But they don’t know that. They don’t even know I exist.” Gendry snorts. “Good thing, too.” He grabs her hand, holding it up between them. Her wrist is smeared with engine grease from where he touched her. “You bring _me_ home, I bet they shut up about finding someone at all costs in a tick.”

Arya stares at where he holds her, the fingernails sticking out of his grasp covered in chipped rose-colored paint cause Sansa roped her into a manicure a few days ago. She follows his arm up to his face. He’s smeared with dirt everywhere and smells like he needed a shower three days ago, and there are enough holes in the muscle shirt he works in that she can already hear her mum muttering that most people _avoid_ looking like they live in a moth hotel. She rolls his voice around in his head, his accent like the cousins Robb always invites to the Stark place cause he doesn’t want to risk his BMW parked on their sidewalk.

She thinks about her first impression of him, how he looked like the kind of dude who spent most of his paycheck on cheap beer and weed and losing bets at seedy sports bars. And he does like weed and cheap beer and there’s a _great_ bar on Market Street where they tend to end up most nights cause the management doesn’t check IDs, but he’s also a freak for political documentaries and she helped him with his taxes last year so she knows he could afford better beer if he didn’t donate so much money to the local soup kitchen and battered women’s shelter…

But looking at him, no one would guess that. Arya imagines him in her family’s immaculate dining room and she can practically hear her dad grinding his teeth.

Arya realizes she’s been quiet for a little too long when Gendry releases her arm and waves a hand in front of her face.

“Hey, earth to Arya. The fuck-”

“Gendry,” Arya interrupts. She turns more towards him and clasps her hands in her lap, flutters her eyelashes. Gendry’s eyes widen and he leans away like he expects her to hit him. “You’re my bestest best friend in the world. You know that, right?”

Gendry’s eyes narrow. “I’m a bit afraid what you’ll do to me if I say no.”

 _He should be afraid_ , Arya thinks with wicked, only slightly-crazed glee _. He should be very afraid_.

“And bestest best friends do each other favors, right?”

Gendry blinks at her, and she sees the moment he gets what she’s going to ask. A look of pure horror crosses his face and she can’t help but bite her lip and grin.

“Arya, I swear to fuck-“

“I think you should do me a favor. And I know _exactly_ what it is.”


End file.
